It's time to kill off the Soviet Union in cyberspace

Let's retire the .su country code

Paul Rosenzweig and I have an oped in WIRED on a particularly fitting sanction for Putin's Russia. Here's an excerpt:

By the end of 1991, the Soviet Union was dead.

But not its country code.

Thirty years later, the Soviet Union endures in the imagination of a former KGB officer now in the Kremlin—and on the internet, where you can still register a domain like stalin.su. … Given its lack of positive value (and the happy end of Communist terror) it is long past time for the .su domain to be consigned to the digital graveyard.

And here's the whole thing: The Ghost of the Soviet Union Still Haunts the Internet

Comments

[Cal Cetín]

The whole raison d'etre for that country code was the existence of the USSR - with the USSR gone, the country code should be gone, too!

Unless that would set a bad precedent for NATO...

[James Pollock]

"The whole raison d'etre for that country code was the existence of the USSR"

uh, no. Most of the raison d'etre was a need to register domains on the Internet in a hierarchical domain name structure. And a domain name structure that place geographical limits on how domains were sorted at the top level.

[Rossami]

And the reason to keep it is because link rot is bad. No matter what you thought of the soviet union, it was part of history. No matter what you thought of the government, some people posted content relying on the existing domain naming rules. That content ought not to be orphabed merely because you want to whitewash history.

[James Pollock]

meh. I don't know how many working links are still available in the .su domain. If anybody is still using a domain name under .su, but if they are, then the nice people who want to discard the TLD should pay the costs of changing to a new domain name.

[Bored Lawyer]

Is AshHeapOfHistory.su available?

[James Pollock]

Is there a top-level domain for the Confederated States of America? Perhaps that would be a place you could park your domain.

[Á àß äẞç ãþÇđ âÞ¢Đæ ǎB€Ðëf ảhf]

Is there some official description of each top level domain, such as "uk: United Kingdom"? Maybe in the interim change it to "Shut Up" or "Sucks".

[Michael P]

https://www.iana.org/domains/root/db is probably the closest. While it indicates that ".sucks" is already available, it does not give a specific expansion of the top-level domain names. IANA/ICANN's general practice is to follow the list of country codes in ISO 3166-1, but the ISO's web page for that suggests that SU is no longer assigned as an Alpha-2 code.

[James Pollock]

the true answer to your question lies in who is assigned responsibility for managing the top-level domains, which in most cases is a private vendor authorized by a national government. So, which national government is currently designated to select a domain registrar for .su?

[jrlevine]

You'd really hope that Stewart Baker would do his homework before writing silly stuff like this.
ICANN has enough sense not to try to decide what is a country, so instead it uses the ISO 3166 list of codes from the International Organization for Standardization. In the two-letter list, a few codes are "exceptionally reserved" including SU, UK, and EU. If ICANN were going to delete SU, it would have to explain why it's not also deleting all of the other exceptionally reserved codes, and that is not a fight anyone is going to win.

https://www.iso.org/obp/ui/#iso:pub:PUB500001:en

[Alphonse Tomato]

What's the point? Antarctica isn't a country, but has a TLD, as do Puerto Rico and the Palestinian Territories. The Laos domain .la is marketed to companies in Los Angeles. Now that goatse is passe, I've never seen .cx in use though apparently some 1800 people life on Christmas Island (it's actually part of Australia anyhow). The .ru TLD is used by the Russian government. Nobody gives a crap about .su except one elderly foreign dictator pining for the imagined glories of his youth.

[James Pollock]

The Republic of Tuvalu's top-level domain (.tv) is mostly occupied by American businesses.
In determining whether or not the .su domain should still exist, there are a couple of questions... first, who's actually running the domain, and second, are there any subdomains that are still active and doing anything other than redirecting to another domain? If it is, then those domains would be affected by dropping the .su TLD, incurring costs to change. Are the people advocating for removing .su also offering to cover those costs?

[Á àß äẞç ãþÇđ âÞ¢Đæ ǎB€Ðëf ảhf]

In a more practical vein, I'd say keep .su, since it used to be valid, and archives presumably still have .su data. Further, if you remove it, that makes it available again, and some new country might want it (some derivative if Sudan, for instance, or South Uganda).

[James Pollock]

"Further, if you remove it, that makes it available again, and some new country might want it"

Wanting it and getting it are separate concepts.